Introducing English as a Lingua Franca: an Online Tutorial

Table of Contents

1. What is English as a Lingua Franca?
2. The tutorial: who it's for and what it aims to do
3. The tutorial: how it works
4. Analysing talk (the slightly theoretical bit)
5. Recording and transcribing: why record, why transcribe, what to transcribe
6. Notation
7. Three examples of classroom talk with accompanying transcripts
8. The activity - section one: form a group
9. The activity - section two: select your recording equipment
10. The activity - section three: record your discussion
11. The activity - section four: transcription and analysis
12. The activity - section five: discuss your transcript
13. Photos of the project team
14. References
15. Further reading
16. Acknowledgements
17. How to print and cite this resource
18. Creative Commons Licence

Notation

In research reports that use conversation analysis, you'll see a variety of notation symbols used to transcribe talk. The great majority of these symbols are based on what is often called the "Jefferson system" after its developer, Gail Jefferson.

For more details on notation in conversation analysis, see the detailed account in Atkinson and Heritage (1984), and the briefer accounts in Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998) and ten Have (1999).

For the purposes of this activity, you may choose to use any, all (or none!) of these symbols.

In deciding whether to transcribe pauses, overlap, pitch, speech rate etc. there are two important things to consider. The first is that tiny details may reveal something very interesting about how you are communicating; so more detail is definitely better than less. The second is that you should try to agree with your group what level of detail to transcribe. If you don't do this, when you come to compare your transcriptions, they'll be very different indeed!

The flashcard activity below is designed to introduce you to some of the symbols commonly used to transcribe talk. Remember that you don't have to use all these symbols, just the ones that help you the interesting bits of your talk. But do also remember that you may not realise at first that something is interesting, until you have tried transcribing it in detail!

To use this activity, look at the notation symbol on the first card (.). Click on Flip card to see what this symbol means. Clicking on Flip card again will take you back to the symbol. Clicking on Next will take you to the symbol on the next flashcard. You can work through the set of twenty-two flashcards in order, or click Shuffle to change the order of the cards. When you can easily remember what the symbol means, you can click Drop this card in order to concentrate on the symbols you haven't yet memorised.

Here is a Microsoft Word template of the notation symbols in the flashcard activity below (in case you need to copy and paste the symbols onto a word processed version of your transcript).

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